Journalists have long captured critical narratives and personal histories that would otherwise be lost in time. Embedded in the modern consciousness are powerful images and videos of warzones, nonviolent and violent protests, and political milestones. “Personal journalists,” such as personal photographers and videographers, have similarly captured births, weddings, rites of passage, and the life histories of families and communities.
Journalists conventionally went to the field with expensive and bulky equipment. A journalist would then trek back to an editing studio so that a specialized team of editors could identify publication-worthy material, incorporate special effects and incorporate narrative elements, either using physical editing equipment or locally installed editing systems. Unfortunately, physical editing systems were bulky, were expensive, and required access to film studios. Moreover, locally installed editing systems could not keep pace with the constant flow of information over sources such as the Internet, where images, video, and crucial perspectives of an event can be available in real-time from a plethora of sources. Thus, conventional journalism was unnecessarily slow and expensive. Conventional journalism generated stale messages produced by the centralized information gathering of a few major studios.
The foregoing examples of film editing systems illustrative and are not exclusive. Those of skill in the art can discern other limitations of the art after reading the specification and studying the drawings.
Generally, audio-video content editing on computer systems involves computationally intensive processes and utilizes larger than usual amounts of computing resources than other computer activities (e.g., word processing, browsing the Internet). This is particularly true when the content editing involves high definition/quality audio or video content, which are well notorious for being large in data size and process heavy during content encoding and decoding processes.
Unfortunately, due to these computing needs, high definition/quality audio-video content editing has typically been limited to powerful computing systems that tend to have the requisite computing resources to perform content editing quickly. If the same high definition/quality content editing were to be performed on a less powerful computing system, the likely result would be slower or poorer content editing performance, possibly to the point where the content editing becomes impractical or impossible. Consequently, less powerful computing systems, such as older computer systems, netbooks, and particular mobile devices, are either prevented from performing audio-video content editing, or relegated to performing audio-video content editing involving only proxy content.
Additionally, in certain situations, content editing projects involving collaboration between two or more users is desirable. Unfortunately, if such collaboration were to be facilitated using traditional high definition/quality audio-video content editing tools installed at individual computing systems, each computing system would require sufficient power to operate the tools in a proper and practical manner.
The foregoing example of trends and issues is intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the art will become apparent to those of skill in the relevant art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.